Karl Hess (Harper and Row, New York City, 1979), 87.95.

This morning I opened the garage door to start up our new used motorcycle. It wasn't there. During the night someone had forced the side window, opened the side door, which had been locked from the inside, and rolled the bike right out the door. We had just bought the bike, it wasn't registered yet, and we thought it would be safe in a locked garage. After all our neighborhood is one of the better ones in Boston. It's almost all white and not poor. Almost no one knew we had the bike because it hadn't been on the road yet. So the thief had to be someone from right around, maybe someone we see every day, or who sees us.

The week was topped off when I was assaulted by five black teenagers on the subway platform after I had tried to dissuade them by my presence from harassing two young white girls who were also waiting for the train. Though there were other people on the platform, nobody helped out, nobody went for the police.

- Another wonderful week in the Athens of North America. But not an extraordinary one. What is extraordi- - nary is that no one was shocked or surprised by what happened because this sort of thing happens all the time. though not to everybody or even to a majority of people. But of ten enough that such things have become an accepted, if still regretted, part of everyday life. In fact I am counted lucky because I wasn't-stabbed, just a few bruises and a black eye.

But I have been stabbed many times, deeply hurt by the callous and unthinking way in which I am approached and treated every day, on the way to work, on the job, even in the neighborhood. A brutal cruelty of a different but no less painful sort characterizes daily interactions, a brutality which I share and take part in as well. Why not? You have to protect yourself and cultivate a hardened indifference to get by. After all, there isn't much you can do about it, is there, especially since what passes for mass movements for political change are usually just as callous and indifferent to individuals as what they want to replace, and often just as violent. Besides, after what has happened to these movements in our century, a little suspicion seems, to me at any rate, in order when people start to extoll the virtues of big parties and big organizations.

Karl Hess has for some time been a critic of contemporary America and an enthusiast for decentralization as the basis of social change. In Dear America, his best book, he laid out his critical view of contemporary affairs, breaking with both commissar and capitalist, and arguing the virtue of a decentralized society. In Neighborhood Government he drew on his own experience and that of others to sketch a general idea of how neighborhoods could be run in an open, democratic, and decentralized fashion. In Community Technology he continues this development, seeking to provide the "material base," the community technology, without which no decentralized social order could survive.

The theme of the book is very simple and common-sense (in the best meaning of the word, akin to "down-to-earth"), though unfortunately not yet common-place. "There is not a single large institution or organization in the world today that is satisfactorily performing all of the functions people have assigned it . . Yet people themselves persist, continue to survive, even make things better; and more and more they do all of those things with less and less direct reference to the major institutions." But large institutions persist, people function within them, and are in the main still habitually thinking big. The result has been the sort of mess I tried to convey above. The obvious alternative to big, alienating (how I hate to use that word) institutions is decentralized or small communities. In making these decentralized communities a reality, there are two crucial elements: community and technology. "A place in which and a way in which people can live peacefully, socially, cooperatively; and tools and techniques to provide the necessary material base for that way of living." Utopian thinking? Not at all. "Possible. Practical. Not pie in the sky, but something for here and now."

The various sections of the book are attempts to flesh out this general theme, though not all of them are convincing or hang together. Nonetheless, this is an extremely interesting book which more conventional reviewers might (mis)label as "important." One of the most interesting sections for me concerned Karl Hess's description of the attempt he and others made over several years at a community technology project in the Adams-Morgan section of Washington, D.C. The group launched a number of projects including fish farming,

rooftop gardening, solar energy collectors, neighborhood assemblies. There was much success, but in the end the group failed, falling before apathy, social climbing, neighborhood violence, and the welfare-reparations mentality. But not before having demonstrated that a community technology is certainly realizable, even if initial attempts fail.

This sort of "politics," decentralist and anarchist, is always roundly criticized as being out of tune and not cognizant of the brutal realities any movement for social change has to face, or is it "interface" these days. But is it really so lame an approach? Or does it in fact demand that we begin to do what is perhaps the hardest thing of all, to think differently, and to see and understand the world from a different perspective? Politics these days is based on expertise, just as business, technology, and learning are. This is true as well of radical politics, the politics of mass movements. But knowledge is not the same as expertise, just as being thrown together in the subway or at work or in an apartment complex is not the same as community, and it is entirely possible that any proposed solution to contemporary social ills that does not answer the need for community, participation, and a sense of mattering will be no solution at all. "If that is the case.. -then the criticism of these speculations as unrealistic should be changed to saying that they are merely unpopular. And that in turn might be modified by saying, Unpopular right now but maybe not tomorrow,"

—Huckleberry Hess